We’re so excited to share our latest features and improvements to the Embrace dashboard!

In this update, we’ll give a walkthrough of our Dashboards page and point out the many ways you can create custom tables and visualizations of the metrics you care about.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this post:

  • How to make a widget dashboard
  • How to make a comparison dashboard
  • How to view and customize the version comparison template
  • How to view and customize the health and trends template

How to Make a Widget Dashboard

Widgets are individual tables or graphs that track one or more metrics. With Embrace, you have full control over how you want to set up and monitor your app’s data. Here are a few examples of the types of things you could monitor with a widget:

  • A graph of crash counts over time, broken out by app version
  • A graph of moment median duration (e.g. startup) over time
  • A table of the count of error logs, broken out by OS version
  • A graph of median session duration over time, broken out by country

To create your own custom widget, head to the Dashboards page, click “Add Dashboard” in the top right corner, and select “Widget”. We provide a few helpful starter widget creators to simplify making some of the most common types of widgets:

  • Crashes – for tracking crash counts over time
  • Error Logs – for monitoring a list of error logs
  • Startup – for tracking the median startup duration
  • Device Count – for tracking metrics broken out by the number of unique users/devices
  • Requests – for monitoring network requests over time

You can easily configure these by adding additional metrics, filters, and grouping. If you’d like to create a widget from scratch, you can start with the Customized Data creator.

Feel free to make as many widgets as you’d like. Once you’re finished, click “Done” to save them onto a widget dashboard. You can name the dashboard accordingly and edit/add/remove widgets to match your ongoing needs.

For a more detailed walkthrough, you can check out this video:

How to Make a Comparison Dashboard

We’ve covered these in a previous feature release, but to summarize, a comparison dashboard is a way to examine the behavior of a metric across groups. We’ll walk through an example below to explain the steps involved in creating one.

From the Dashboards page, click “Add Dashboard” in the top right corner. Then select “Comparison.” You’ll be greeted with an editor like the following:

Segments are the groups you want to compare your metric across. If you wanted to monitor crash counts across app versions, then app versions would be your segment. If you wanted to monitor failed network requests across OS versions, then OS versions would be your segment.

A segment can be one of the following types:

  • App version
  • Build
  • Country
  • Environment
  • Model
  • OS major version
  • OS version
  • Persona
  • Session property key

In our example above, our segment is app version as indicated by the Group by App Version box. Note that we must specify the comparison to be either “in order” or “against one group”.

“In order” means that segment 2 will be compared to segment 1, segment 3 will be compared to segment 2, etc. So when looking for improvements or regressions in a metric, each segment is compared against the one that comes before it. In the example graph below, app version 4.34.2 has a lower crash count than 4.33.6. The number is green to highlight this change as an improvement. However, 4.34.5 has a higher crash count than 4.33.6, so this number is red to indicate a regression.

“Against one group” means that we select one segment as a control group, and every other segment is compared to that one for highlighting improvements/regressions. See the below table for an example. Since both 4.33.6 and 4.34.5 have higher crash counts than the control group 4.34.2, both of their crash counts are in red.

Filters are further refinements to the data so you can focus on what you care about. For example, if you want to know how your network requests perform on the latest OS versions, you could filter so the data only includes those versions. In our example above, we’ve selected country as a filter so that we can focus on users in the United States.

Metrics are the underlying measurable that you’re interested in. Embrace supports a wide variety of metrics, covering crashes, logs, network requests, ANRs, cold starts, app health, user terminations, and more. There are too many to list them all here, but suffice to say, if you want to monitor it, Embrace can do it. In our example above, we’ve selected Crash Count as our metric.

Graphs are supplemental visualizations. In the example above, we’re comparing Crash Count across app versions. We’ve added a graph that shows the session counts by version so we can easily tell the relative traffic of each version for more context.

When you’re finished, click “Save” to create your comparison dashboard. You can then give it a name, edit it, and even duplicate it as a starting off point for making your next one!

For a more detailed walkthrough, you can check out this video:

How to View and Customize the Version Comparison Template

Embrace comes with a few template dashboards to provide out of the box insights about your application. One such template is the Version Comparison template. You can access it from the Dashboards page.

Here you’ll find several performance and stability metrics being compared across your recent app versions. If you’d like to make some configurations to it, you can duplicate it and make edits by clicking the link in the blue box.

The default Version Comparison template comes with a couple graphs as well. One shows your app’s adoption over time, and the other shows your app’s health metric over time. You can configure these visualizations and add to them as well.

Duplicating and editing a preexisting template is an easy way to get started with Embrace dashboards. You’ll get a nice overview of your app’s performance and be able to quickly spot regressions across versions.

The Health and Trends template is another out of the box Embrace dashboard. You can access it from the Dashboards page. It has several visualizations, some of which include:

  • Daily Active Users
  • Crash Free Users
  • Adoption by User Count
  • Median Time Spent in App per Session
  • App Health

Similar to the Version Comparison template, you can duplicate it and make configurations to it to suit your needs. Since many of these visualizations have real-time data, they are great for displaying on a TV. You can click the TV icon at the top of any dashboard to switch to presentation mode.

And that’s it! Now, your team can build the widget dashboards and comparison dashboards that work for you. You can create as many dashboards as you like so that team members can focus on the data they care about.

As always, please share any feedback so we can continue to build features and improvements that help your team be successful.

How Embrace Helps Mobile Teams

Embrace is an observability and debugging platform built for mobile teams. We are a comprehensive solution that fully reproduces every user experience from every single session. Your team gets the data it needs to proactively identify, prioritize, and solve any issue that’s costing you users or revenue.

Want to see how Embrace can help your team ship better apps? Request a customized demo and see a path to improvement immediately!

Want to learn how Embrace can help improve the performance and stability of your Unity mobile games? Try us out and see for yourself!